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Registration is still open for the fifth annual North Words Writers Symposium, scheduled for May 28-31 in Skagway. This year’s theme is “Exploring the Frontiers of Language.”

British-American writer Simon Winchester will be the keynote speaker. He is the author of 22 books, including the 2010 New York Times best-seller “The Man Who Loved China” and “The Professor and the Madman,” an account of the men behind the Oxford English Dictionary. His most recent work is “The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible.”

Winchester will be joined at the Skagway symposium by a faculty of Alaska and Yukon authors that includes Alaska Writer Laureate Nora Marks Dauenhauer and her husband Richard, Michael Gates, Nick Jans, Marcel Jolley, Heather Lende, Lael Morgan, John Straley and Deb Vanasse. Faculty will serve on panels to discuss several writing and publishing topics and will also do a public reading during one of the evening sessions.

There also will be time set aside for one-on-one sessions with authors, participant readings and a chance to have works published in a symposium journal. Course credit is available through the University of Alaska Southeast.

North Words is becoming known for its mix of writer-participant interaction and group activities such as a White Pass & Yukon Route train ride-trail write, Red Onion Saloon taco feed-brothel tour, Dyea cabin retreat cookout with music, and keynote banquet at Poppies Restaurant at Jewell Gardens.